Four years after publishing, Travesuras de la ni a mala, Vargas Llosa has completed El sue o del celta, a work based on the provocative life of Irishman Roger Casement, one of the first to document human rights abuses in European-ruled colonies.

Casement''s shocking revelations exposed a painful truth: Europeans were committing unspeakably barbarous acts in the name of commerce, civilization, and Christianity. What Casement witnessed ultimately led him to confront England and the imperialist policies enforced in his native Ireland. He became a militant for the Irish Nationalist cause and during World War I conspired with the German government to purchase weapons for a revolt set to take place during the Easter holiday. But the weapons never made it to Irish shores, and the British brutally suppressed the Easter Rising. All Irish rebel leaders, including Casement, were executed. Many pleaded clemency for Casement including Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats, and George B. Shaw.

From the Publisher:Explores the life of Sir Roger Casement, a British consul who was appalled by the horrors of colonialism that he saw in the Belgian Congo and in Peru, and who was later executed for his role in the Irish rising of 1916.

Author Bio

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa's parents divorced before he was born, and he lived with his mother and grandparents in Bolivia. They remarried, however, when he was 10, and the family moved to Lima. His father opposed his literary and artistic interests and sent him to a military academy, where he encountered all the brutality of machismo. He attended the University of San Marcos in Lima and, after college, became a journalist, living in Paris for seven years writing short stories and writing for newspapers. His first novel, THE TIME OF THE HERO (1962), was based on his military school memories and criticism of the Peruvian military regime; it was denounced as Communist propaganda in Peru, but it brought Vargas Llosa international fame. Since then, he has published several novels and short-story collections, plays, and literary criticism, and has continued to speak out against political abuses. In 2010 the Nobel Prize Academy presented Mr. Vargas Llosa the literary prize "for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."